[Continued from part 2, here]

In part 2, I proposed that (in short) the best way to shine up the ‘God is not great’ delusion is not to argue about it, but to live it, by letting and allowing the great, amazing, radical grace of God to transform our lives in a really tangible, visible way, no matter how hard it may seem to channel this radical grace through our not-so-great/amazing/radical selves. Because the testimony of a radically changed life simply cannot be argued with.

However, one’s testimony has the greatest power not as a spoken speech or written essay, but as the visible changes in one’s life. It is very easy for someone to ignore a spoken or written account of the miracles and momentous events of your life; it is not so easy for someone to ignore your life itself when it is lived out in front of them. If we work towards radically transforming our lives, as we should, this alone will powerfully affect only those who already know you well.

Of course, this is important, but in a sense it is not enough. We may be demonstrating to our close friends (and hopefully our enemies) that our God must be great, but the circle of influence is likely to stop there. If we want to turn the current mainstream view of God upside down, more must be done in order to get out into the mainstream.

Part 2 very much dealt with the idea that ‘God gave us our lives and souls to restore and change’. But at its core, Christianity is a religion concerned with servanthood, selflessness; serving the needs of others. Those kinds of words. Being released from and fighting against our own addiction to sin is all well and good, but God didn’t just give us our own lives to restore and change. He gave us the lives of others, as well. Matthew 9:35-38:

‘Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field”.’

Fundamentally, my point is simple. We were commanded to evangelise. Therefore, we should evangelise.

Supporting reasons are numerous, even when only focusing on how to shine up the ‘God is not great’ delusion for what it really is. A simple extension of the thrust of the argument from part 2 is that evangelism/introducing people to the life-changing nature of Jesus will hopefully lead to complete changes in their lives, which will then create a whole new ‘good fruit’ visible to a whole new circle of people. If repeated enough, it’s plausible that eventually, enough people will become visibly awesome Christians that our concept of God becomes recognised in the mainstream as something pretty cool too. 

[Of course, a disclaimer: evangelism is not just important for the sake of glorifying our God. Evangelism is intrinsically important, because every soul on this planet is Jesus-deprived. But it is important to note that the two are inextricably linked; by properly satisfying that God-shaped hole in people's hearts, we hopefully end up transforming lives, producing good fruit, and impacting many others by proxy. I wish only to note the wider impact we could have via evangelism, if only to convict, encourage and stir us more readily into action.]

For another, deeper reason, I want to focus specifically on this part of the passage:

‘When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.’

Crowds, harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 

We still have those today, in depressing abundance. Yet Western society generally turns a cold, blind eye. We become the contradiction of people with shopping bags filled with extraneuous goods walking past beggars sleeping in the streets. But, just as how in part 2 I wrote of Christians needing to be radically nice relative to ourselves, we must also be radically nice relative to the norms of society. 

This means doing something about the ‘harassed and helpless’, or as Jesus describes them elsewhere, the ‘least of these’. In some areas, Christians have been okay at doing this, e.g. Martin Luther King, William Wilberforce. Today, Christians in the West still make up a large proportion of all charity and volunteer organisations. Homeless shelters, prison ministers, drug clinics – quite a few organisations of these have a generally Christian focus. One of the writers of the Alcoholics Anonymous guidebook was a Christian minister. Obviously, this is good work that should be continued and expanded.

Yet many of these surviving organisations are firmly rooted in history. They help those who are often ‘helpless’, but no longer ‘harassed’. Unfortunately, today, harassed people are often ignored even by the church. The targets of harassment have moved on. In Britain at least, social groups known as chavs are particularly targeted as worse-than-useless.  The first result of the Google search for ‘Christian Chavs’ turns up ‘Did you mean: christian chavez ’, which pretty much sums it up. More outreach to alienated groups like these can, and must, be done.

After all, these are fruitful avenues for evangelism. The ‘helpless’ beneficiaries of social-justice organisations are those who may also respond best to ‘preaching the good news of the kingdom’. Those who are most aware that they are sick also realise that they need they doctor.

The ‘harassed’, on the other hand, may respond with initial resentment at any contact approaching evangelism. But at the same time, being harassed, neglected and scorned by the world at large, they could potentially respond well if we somehow found a way to communicate the love of Christ towards them. 

Nevertheless, the relative ease of evangelism isn’t my focus on the necessity and importance of reaching out to the ‘least of these’. It’s the opposite, in fact. Most people would agree that it takes some great effort to transform the lives of, say, addicts, or chavs. And naturally the greatness of God is most clearly displayed to the external world when it is lives such as these which become utterly changed. Although every believer’s full, honest testimony speaks volumes about the power and love of God, the world finds it much harder to ignore when drug dealers and thugs start distributing love and fighting injustice instead of dishing out weed and attacking one another. 

Indeed, the most impacting testimony I ever heard was from a former murderous heroin addict (in short). It was responsible for a complete renewal of my faith. So just imagine and dream with me a society where chavs are getting lairy for Christ, transforming their tight-knit crews into fellowships and churches, and acting to positively impact the lives of those around them. A society where chavs themselves volunteer to help the helpless and communicate the awesomeness of a God who gave their lives hope and meaning. A society where chavs are harassed only because no-one has any other adequate response to how and why they’ve become so radically nice. In short, a society where chavs aren’t known as bad eggs, but good fruit.

And alongside that society, let us create a society where addicts turn up to rehab with no signs of withdrawal symptoms, because they’re addicted to God. A society where the homeless remain homeless only in order to imitate Jesus more fully. A society where God’s work is undeniably displayed in all, for all to see. 

It sounds impossible. Thankfully, that’s God’s domain. Indeed, we must remember that it is only by the strength of the Holy Spirit that we can even dream of doing such things.

But we must dream to do them, first. After all, why else do we pray for God’s kingdom to come, here on earth as it is in heaven?

 

* * *

 

I recently stumbled upon this quote from Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller which I feel summarises the gist of the arguments of the past three posts:

‘There are some guys who don’t believe in God and can prove he doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care. I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. If I walk away from Him, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything.’

Likewise, from the opposite angle, I believe that the key to exposing the ‘God is not great’ delusion is not intellectual. It is in the things we do. It is about the identity of God, our tree, as shown in our own identities as His fruit. It is in our social impact when we take both those identities and shine like stars in an overcast world. It is the deep emotional changes we must bring about, as we follow God to restore, transform and fulfil people’s hearts and souls.

If we can do this, if we can truly bring God’s kingdom down to earth, then the undeniable greatness of our God will surely be with us every step of the way.

So, let us demolish proofs and build heaven instead.

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